Designing Your Home Like An Interior Designer

Everyone deserves a stunning home, but what if you don’t know how to design a home? You don’t need thousand-dollar pictures or any certain design style. To create a well-designed room is also very relative to who is designing the space.

We all have our preferences and styles, we all have different colors and patterns that we love and that we don’t. That means we all have a different idea of a well-designed room.

So what is it that really goes into designing your home?

How do designers create amazing spaces all the time for all sorts of different styles? Finding accents and furniture you love, making sure they fit, making sure they’re on a budget.

If you’ve decorated a room on your own, you know how challenging it can be. Every little detail that goes into it, seemingly endless options, how do designers really do this all that time? There are so many things to consider!

After finding something you love, are you sure it fits right in the space? Is it the right size, color, and texture to do what it needs to do in this space?

Well, I’ll tell you a little secret, there’s a secret sort of blueprint that I’m about to share with you. Something you probably already know, but maybe don’t quite understand yet, or understand how to use it when creating a well-designed room. 

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Before we get into learning the real secret, let’s start with the basics. 

Choose a starting point or piece

When deciding whether you will be decorating or renovating, start small to avoid being overwhelmed. There is a lot that goes into creating a well-designed and well-balanced space, so you want to make sure you only take on what you can handle at that time. 

Choose the space you will be designing. You can go a step further than this and even choose one small piece to start (like this Boho rattan entryway console) with and continue your design around.

I like to do this when creating sample renders. Just about all the renders you see on my home page and design package pages all started by me seeing one piece and building a beautiful room around it. 

Now, when you do this you want to still have a plan. Don’t just get one piece and add on to what matches that, you may end up with a non cohesive or poorly balanced design. Just use this as a starting point to help plan out the rest of the space.

Understanding your style is key to designing your room like an interior designer

Learning your own personal design style can be a bit harder than many people realize. I notice a lot of individuals have an idea of what they want but don’t know which style it would be considered then end up picking one that’s close and trying to mimic this style and not liking the outcome.

Well, that’s because a lot of people have more than one! Don’t limit your options to one style, chances are for a well-balanced look you may want to use more than one, and that’s perfectly fine! 

We will get into how to better find your design style below. 

Inspirations and mood boards

Inspiration! Nothing helps any sort of project like inspiration. Helps keeps things going, helps find new ideas, helps you think of things you may have never thought of before! Everyone needs inspiration for anything, you definitely want it when designing a room!

Get on Pinterest or any other platform of your choice, and search for space you will be designing. For example search “Living room Decor” or even “Living room before and after” for some really amazing inspirations. You can check out the hashtag #HomeDecor on Instagram or even go search for some interior designers. 

Find as many inspirational photos as you can for some fresh ideas! Save them all to your phone so they can be easily accessed and start to build a plan using your inspirational photos. This can also help you achieve a unique design style by seeing different styles and different ways others combine them.

For all design projects I highly highly recommend creating a mood board. I recommend doing this of all the pieces you are choosing for your space, a mood board is super simple to create plus you can see how each piece will look in the overall design. You don’t need any special graphic design knowledge to do this, but it will help a lot.

If you’re stuck between two pieces try the design with both of them and see how they look, if you can’t figure out what material something should be for example a stone table or glass, you can try each on the mood board and see what fits better with your other pieces. This will make sure you always have a well designed room, because you’ll know before actually buying the pieces and putting them together what it will look like. 

Stick with one main color palette

This is huge when it comes to designing a space. Having too many colors and textures going on can be overwhelming. You want the eye to always keep moving, but with balance. It shouldn’t be shooting all over the place going “What the Bleep is going on here?” 

I always stress the importance of a color pallet. This ensures everything is cohesive and flows throughout the design. You want to keep interest going with different colors and elements, but it needs to all look purposeful and not like you keep buying the new sale item at Home Good regardless of how it fits in your home or design. 

The Secret To Designing Your Room Like An Interior Designer

The secret? Well you know those design questionnaires all designers have their clients fill out? Those are the secrets!

Well that doesn’t sound like much of a secret now does it? The real secret is to understand what all of those questions and answers mean. 

Sure, some of them are very straight forward and have no hidden meanings in the answers. But, some of the questions are the key to capturing the perfectly well-designed room for that individual. 

For example, the staple questions “How do you want the space to feel” 

There can be so many different answers to this, relaxing, empowering, cozy, eccentric, inspirational, enviable.

One of the most common answers is cozy, so we will use this as an example. You or a client wants a cozy space, what goes into making a space feel cozy?

When designing a cozy space you are probably going to avoid bright vibrant colors for large items in the space. Keep furniture and paint colors neutral. This doesn’t mean it has to be a solid neutral color, add fun prints or a funky wallpaper depending on the style you want to achieve. This will help you in being able to relax. In a cozy space what do people want to do? Most likely, they want to feel relaxed. 

Textures are an important part of a cozy room. Mixing together different fabrics can cozy up space. Let’s pick an example. For a living room we want to feel cozy how might we do this with textures? We have a neutral canvas to work with(From Above) so now we will add in textures. Find a comfy fabric sofa, then you can add different styles of throw pillows. Here is also the fun part where you can start adding more vibrant colors and patterns! 

Next, you could add a wicker basket like this one that I am currently loving in my home, and this is a great way to store your throw blankets, which I am using for. Keep them easy to reach plus use them in the overall design of the space! I love how cozy this makes my room feel.

Depending on your design style you may want to add rich wood tones, this can also help compliment all the fabrics and make for an overall cozy space. Maybe you want to add in metals or stone, whatever your style make sure it can work well with everything to give you the overall feel you want in the space. 

So, we got down our colors and textures, is that all?

When designing your home like an interior designer you always want to make sure there is balance. You want to avoid having just one lone item stand out, instead, you want to always keep the eye moving. 

This all ties into having a cohesive design and ensuring everything flows, regardless of your floor plan. 

This could be a much longer posts and I could go on and on in depth about what all it takes really designing your home like an interior designer, but the most important thing to know is you need to know what you want.

Interview yourself from a designers standpoint, then break each answer down like this

How do I want my space to feel? 

I want my space to feel modern and vibrant. 

What feels modern? What would feel vibrant?

You don’t need to know a bunch about design to do this it could be as simple as this answer:

Clean lines and bright colors. 

What is this space being used for?

This space is my dining room, it will be used for hosting parties. 

What does this mean?

This means I will have a lot of guests over. I want lots of seating and a conversation piece or two since a lot of people will be over. 

Ask as many questions as you can think of that are relevant to your space, ask yourself about children and pets, and how this would affect your design. 

Set your budget and timeline. You don’t have to purchase everything at once! Having a list and plan allows this to be a gradual process, you purchase one or two items at a time as best fit you, but doing this without a plan can be pretty impossible when trying to create a well-designed room. 

If you don’t have a plan and try to buy pieces one at a time to better fit your budget, then it can be difficult to know what the final result will end up being. Although you may have a bunch of pieces you love, they may not all go together for a well designed and cohesive look. 

To sum up, it’s all really about setting intentions for your space, and then having a vibe or vision down before you start shopping and bringing in key pieces. Ask yourself lots of questions, formulate a moodboard, a plan and a budget! Hope this helped :)! If it did or if you have your own tips to add, please leave a comment below!